"A bill recently introduced in Congress would greatly expand the exemption to the Fair Labor Standards Act for IT employees, ending overtime benefits for many more types of workers, including network, database and security specialists." The Democrat senator of North-Carolina has introduced an even worse version of the bill, which specifically exempts database and network specialists and security professionals from overtime benefits. Say, isn't some company building a huge data centre in North-Carolina? I'm sure it's all a coincidence.

Public sector unions should be abolished, they're nothing but thieves guilds. But that's a topic for another discussion.

You are right that it still picks and chooses who gets it and who doesn't, but it's at least a step in the direction of abolishing federal requirements in the private sector.

I will go on record that there was one time where I was required to be "on call" for a weekend as a new project went live. I didn't like it, and protested as such. However, as a form of compensation, they did pay for conferences that weren't directly related to the job, that I was interested in. I consider that to be just compensation for random sporadic overtime requests. Any sane employer, however demanding, will come to some agreement. The employees _do_ have a leg to stand on, as they're the ones actually doing the work. Retarded employers will fire employees who protest, but those are also the employers that will go under because they lose talent.

If the federal government wants to have its hand in the relations of an employee's work hours, it should mandate only that employees work an "acceptably agreed upon work week, and justly compensated for overtime." No specifics, let the employer and employee work those out on their own. Again, that goes back to the title of my original comment: It's the contract, stupid. Big Brother could lay out the framing of the contract while not dictating every word of it.